


tangling hands, tangling lives

by unicyclehippo



Series: Blue Girls Have The Most Fun [32]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, but its definitely intended to be there, it's not explicitly beauyashter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25200058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicyclehippo/pseuds/unicyclehippo
Summary: Beauyashter prompt, 'Touch starved but oh so very patient'?or,Despite what she says, Beau is good at giving. What she is truly shit at is asking for things.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha
Series: Blue Girls Have The Most Fun [32]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824289
Comments: 8
Kudos: 161





	tangling hands, tangling lives

Beau is good at one thing: being a smart-ass. She’s been talking back to people since she was only months old, so the story goes—a red-faced scrunched-up ugly-as-all-hell baby (cute despite it all, because this story was only ever told kindly) and any time her parents cooed over her or spoke to her, she’d burst back with a torrent of angry babble, tiny baby fists waving.

Wait.

Beau is good at _two_ things: being a smart-ass, and being a shit-kicker. She’s got a helluva mouth on her, two fists and two feet, and the gods themselves can’t to _shit_ to stop her from using ‘em.

No, wait. Fuck.

She’ll get it right this time. She’s trying this whole “awareness” thing, truth or whatever, and has this idea that if she runs from the truths inherent in herself then she’s gonna miss them in other people. So—

Beau is good at _three_ things: being a smart-ass, being a shit-kicker, and being a nosy piece of shit. Curiosity is her constant companion – it infects her, takes over her tongue, her hands, makes her say things and touch things because she wants to know who, and how, and what, and _why_? What’s better in this world than knowing how it all works? What’s better than getting to take the time to figure it all out?

Way back when, when she was by herself and cutting out from the Archives to see the world and what it had to offer, she was interested in liars and cheats and scoundrels and gems. She loves gems. Jewellery too, actually—likes the way the claws of rings hold cut stones in place, likes to watch as jewellers grind and polish them into shapes. Likes examining them for facets and flaws. Big surprise there, to anyone who knows Beau. Back then, she wouldn’t’ve said anything about it but now—months down the track and kinda sorta embroiled in a lot of people’s messes—if anyone asked, Beau might— _might_ —admit she isn’t in it for the flaws. She just…thinks they’re important. Thinks they can’t and shouldn’t be looked over. Flaws are the factors that set gems apart, make them different. Hell, sometimes they even make them more expensive! It’s the same with people, in some ways. It’s not that she’s looking for the bad shit they do, or the ways in which they’re fucked up—it’s just that once you know those things, once you’ve found that, sometimes it shows you more about the person.

Okay, that’s a relatively new revelation.

Beau used to just like to be able to point out the fact that _Hey, fucker, I might be a piece of shit but so are you, and here’s my fucking proof: exhibit A_ , and so on.

But now…

People are complicated, and they’re in over their heads, and things that sound like lies aren’t always lies—or not entirely—and Beau has always been a details kinda person but she knows when to take a step back and gauge the entirety of a situation. Even when it’s hard. Even if it strains the mind, or proves impossible.

Which is all to say, that is, Beau is sharing a room with Jester and Yasha and she hasn’t been able to sleep for thinking.

She has, as quietly as she was able, moved a small table to sit beneath the window and laid out her jewellers kit to clean and polish a few of the rings and other pieces they’ve picked up along their journey, and the beading and crystal and stone worked into her fine expositors robes. It’s not something she does when other people can see—such patient care from her would earn more questions than she would like, which is zero—but they’re having an audience with the King again tomorrow and, while they didn’t have a choice about it last time, Beau would like to make something of a good impression this time.

The work is slow and methodical. Repetitive. Calming. Picking up a ring and turning it over. Digging the small tools into the grooves to clear the build-up. Aligning the claws around the gems until they’re sturdy. Rubbing the treated cloth over the metal until it glows burnished beneath the candle-light. Working over each stitched bead of her vestments particularly gives Beau plenty of time to think.

So she does.

Her mind clicks over the cult and Trent and Caleb, and the letter, and Kamordah for a moment before Beau snaps away from that, powerfully enough that her head actually snaps to the side.

She shakes the thought away. Blinks over at her friends and forces her heart beat to slow and settle.

Yasha sleeps differently now. Deeply. Beau’s mind fiddles and fusses with the details of what it has learned as she fiddles and fusses with a piece of gemstone between her fingers. She fits jagged pieces together like a puzzle. A mosaic, more like, with the pieces sharp enough to cut. Beau cuts herself on them, winces when she thinks, _Defensive mechanism maybe? Hoping to die in her sleep? Or maybe just to stay in a dream where she was more of herself?_

She would have to ask Yasha questions to find out more. She’s not doing that.

Jester, meanwhile, is sleeping fitfully. She’s laying on her side and has an extra pillow cuddled tight to her, and as Beau drags the polishing cloth over a pretty green stone, what is very clearly supposed to be an emerald—a fake, a good one, but fake—she watches Jester twitch and mumble something in her sleep. Watches fingers dig tight into the pillow. Watches her tail wrap and wrap around her calf and ankle.

_A nightmare_.

She doesn’t have to ask Jester to know that.

Beau is good at three things: being a smart-ass, being a shit-kicker, and figuring shit out.

Her friends, her girls, they need something and Beau knows what some of it is: calm, safety, protection, reassurances, attention. The things most people need when they’ve been through not just one but, like, a _hundred_ fucking traumatic experiences.

Thing is, Beau can figure shit out. She’s good at it, most of the time. The thing she _isn’t_ good at—really, _really_ isn’t good at—is _fixing_ those things.

Beau returns her attention to the rings. Sets the finished ones aside but the one she’s working on now—real sapphire, square cut, gold—she wears on her index finger, turning it carefully to get at the problem spots.

She isn’t good at it. But she can try.

* * *

Yasha is in some ways harder to talk to than Jester, but in a big way she’s also much easier to talk to. The woman has been admitting to things and explaining things and trying her best to make amends in whatever patchwork manner she can, and Beau has zero qualms in using that for her own purposes.

‘You look like shit,’ Beau tells her, sitting down across from her at the breakfast table. The inn they’ve stopped in is small but nice, and it has opened the shutters on the east wall to let the morning light stream in like ribbons of gold. Yasha is sat next to one of them, scritching carefully behind Frumpkin’s ears.

Yasha glances up. Settles a moment on beau’s chest before looking away again. ‘I just bathed.’

‘That’s - no - you don’t look like _actual_ shit,’

‘Beau.’ Yasha smiles. ‘I’m joking.’

Beau leans back on the bench seat. Braces her elbows against the back board, scoffs. ‘Yeah, totally, I knew that.’ She looks away. The maid is still making up her plate over in the kitchens. Beau sighs, scratches at her undercut. ‘You want to talk about it?’

‘Sure,’ Yasha agrees easily. Her shoulders betray her, tensing, tightening.

They sit there in an awkward silence before,

‘Ysually people say something—‘

‘Do you have questio—‘

‘Oh, go ahead,’

‘No, no,’ Yasha waves her free hand, the other still so gently petting Frumpkin. She hides behind her hand like it’s a shield, interposed between them. ‘Go ahead.’

Beau clears her throat. Feels an itch start up behind her eyes, exhausted on so many levels, for so many reasons.

‘I was just gonna say, you said yes to talking but then you didn’t, so,’

‘I thought…you had questions.’

‘I didn’t mean it as a fucking interrogation, Yash,’ Beau says, and there’s no heat to her words at all. They’re dry, just dust, spilling out of her. ‘If you wanna talk, I’m here. That’s all I meant.’

Yasha nods.

Beau’s breakfast comes and she eats as she always does in quick motions, an arm curled around the plate as she shovels the eggs into her mouth. A few strips of bacon into the pocket for later and she’s done. She shoves the plate to the far end of the table to take back to the kitchens later but doesn’t move just yet. She lets her eyes fall onto the window. The dark wood is painted nearly white with the morning sunlight and she can see dust motes drifting gently through the haze, puffing into swirls and eddies whenever someone moves.

‘Are you going to - report me?’

Beau drags her attention back to Yasha. Sees not fear or upset but a deep and abiding resignation in those eyes.

‘I already have.’ Yasha nods. ‘I told them the truth. You weren’t yourself.’

Yasha’s forehead folds into a deep frown. ‘You said you didn’t know that. Not for sure. You said—‘

‘I say a lot of shit.’

‘You were not lying. You nearly died,’ Yasha says, and she doesn’t stumble over that or flinch away from it, though she had a big hand in it. ‘I think you could barely see, then, let alone lie.’

‘I lie better than I see,’ Beau tells her. Shrugs. ‘But you’re not wrong. I told you I figured two things were the most likely. And we got you back, so, there we go. Eliminated the other reason. You weren’t yourself,’ Beau tells her with the exact force and directness she had told the High Curator to their face, zero intention of negotiating or altering that statement.

After a moment, when Yasha says nothing, Beau leans back in her seat and moves one booted foot forward until it touches Yasha’s. She looks away, returns her attention to the window. The other woman pulls her foot back to make room for Beau’s. Beau can feel Yasha watching her, so she closes her eyes.

Eventually, she feels a pressure against the side of her foot, Yasha’s finding hers again and resting alongside it. And they sit.

* * *

Jester is harder to talk to. She speaks in dizzying circles and makes jokes and has Beau all in a tangle before she can ask anything important, but Beau still tries. It takes a little longer but Beau takes that step back that she needs sometimes and watches properly, like Jester is a mark or a competitor. And Beau finds that, beyond the whirlwind of chatter and creation and creativity, Jester has made for herself a very neat little bubble. No one goes in. Jester rarely comes out. So when Jester makes an offer—one that she knows, she _knows_ , Beau will refuse—Beau looks her square in the eyes and accepts.

Jester stops in her tracks. A cute little frown digs between her brows. ‘What?’

‘I said sure,’ Beau tells her, crooks a challenging smile. ‘Go wild.’

‘You _want_ me—to paint your face?’

‘Yup.’

‘Like, me? With my paints?’

‘Yeah. it’s a party, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Jester agrees, eyes widening, and she clambers to her feet. ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, Beau! This is going to be so much fun! And so much better than the last time I did it, I promise I won’t make you into a creepy snake again, it’ll be so pretty, I promise.’

Beau shrugs. ‘Sure. I trust you.’

Jester hurries to her haversack, planted at Caleb’s feet within the clear set dome of the hut. Beau can’t hear their conversation but she does notice that Jester comes close to but doesn’t quite touch Caleb. Respectful of his raw state, maybe. She returns with a set of familiar paints, coloured and carefully wrapped in protective cloth and leather.

‘This isn’t the magic stuff, is it?’

‘No,’ Jester laughs. ‘These are just my normal paints.’

‘From your mom.’

‘Mhm! What do you want?’ she asks, sorting through them. ‘What about…a moor bounder?’

‘We’re in the empire so I’m gonna have to go with a no.’

‘They might not know what they look like. You might just look really, really cool and scary.’

‘That’s…true.’

‘I could also make you a cat or a tree or a bunny or an eagle or—‘

‘Can you make me an owl?’

Jester grins, eyes bright. ‘I can try. It’ll take a while and—Hey, Caleb? Can you make Frumpie—‘

‘He can’t hear you, Jes,’

‘CAN YOU MAKE FRUMPIE—‘

‘No,’ Beau laughs, throwing a hand up over Jester’s mouth. The touch sends a jolt through her palm, makes her heart race. She’s abruptly too aware of that bubble Jester has made around herself, too aware that she just broke it; she lets her hand drop, wipes it on her knee. The rasp of fabric makes her skin prickle, tickle, in almost the same manner. ‘He – he’s in the hut, it blocks sound.’

‘Oh. Right.’

Fifteen minutes later, owl Frumpkin perched and sleeping on Beau’s pack, they are ready. Jester sits beside her and lays out the paints. Negotiates for a full minute how to sit so that she can comfortably paint Beau’s face. Her cheeks darken with colour as she scoots closer, darken further still when Beau spreads her legs into a V for her.

Jester moves closer. Her knees press to the inside of Beau’s thighs and, when she reaches up to paint the first layer over Beau’s face, her free hand comes to rest on the bunched tight muscle of Beau’s thigh, stabilising herself.

Beau swallows. It makes a dry click in her throat. She closes her eyes. Tries to focus on the balmy day, the sounds of Fjord and Nott training in the field nearby, rather than the hand pressing on her leg or the wet, tacky pull of the paint as it is slowly layered onto her face.

Jester is quiet.

It strikes Beau as odd a few minutes into this whole thing—and her brain sharpens, pulls her focus from the hazed, drifting _She’s touching me, she smells like lavender_ to purpose.

Beau’s eyes flutter open. Wander over the look of peace, of focused intent, of muted joy as Jester paints. Feels acutely pinned under the force of blue eyes as Jester leans in and drags the wet tip of the brush just _so_ under Beau’s chin and along the side of her jaw to frame her face. When she pulls back, Jester’s eyes slide to meet Beau’s and she smiles, crinkles her nose.

‘Hi,’ she whispers.

‘Hey.’

She doesn’t have any questions anymore. Jester looks at peace for once, and if this is what it takes, Beau can provide it for her.

* * *

Beau takes Jester’s hand, guides her over the cracked and crumbling rocks down off the path. Jester’s head tilts in the direction of Yasha, walking slow and purposeful like a fucking death march by herself, and they step up to meet her. Beau finds herself flanking her, with Jester on her other side, and setting her hand on the small of Yasha’s back.

* * *

Yasha awakes in the swampy heat that rolls in before a storm. Beau fumbles awake at her side and ignores Yasha’s quiet offer to go back to sleep, to not worry. She stumbles up out of bed and sits with her, leans heavy against Yasha’s shoulder when Yasha takes her place at the fire. Beau falls back to sleep like that, drooling a little. Yasha must not mind the company, might even have been thankful for it, because as they make their second days’ march across the sulphur drenched fields toward Pride’s Call, Yasha is a solid presence at her side.

* * *

Beau braids Jester’s hair.

Puts a hand on Yasha’s shoulder like she would for Caleb when she haltingly tells them of her last visit to this pit, to Pride’s Call.

Drapes her blue-and-brown coat around Jester when she tosses and turns in a sleepless night. Lays beside her with a hand on her staff so that Jester knows she’s safe, knows Beau is there for her.

Brings Jester into a tight hug when the other girl shivers, shakes, at the sight of the massacre in the pit, the rows and piles of dead bodies.

‘Anyone else reminded of that place? Way back when we first met. The arcane laboratory back in Zadash? Fjord fell into the pit trap?’ Beau says aloud, voice blunted, like the horror before them is no worse than anything else they’ve seen. She wraps her other arm around Yasha. A silent addition, unspoken. _This wasn’t you_.

Fjord picks up on it easily, eyes tracking where Beau begins and ends, connected to both Yasha and Jester. He nods. ‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ he says, and nothing more.

* * *

They have to go through Kamordah. A contact is there, or something. Beau doesn’t quite know because her head fills with this buzzing, crackling sound and even when she sees Jester talking to her she can’t make out the words. She can feel, though, the way gentle hands take her and press her down to sitting and the way her heart stutters when strong arms wrap around her in a hug. Her brain that never, ever stops going, running, thinking…stops.

Beau almost sighs with relief.

Fingers wind and weave in her hair, scratching against her scalp. Other hands rub gently at her shoulders. Soothing Beau. As stress floods out of her, her body shuts down into sleep.

When she wakes, it is with a single thought prominent in her mind, like her brain had pieced it together while she slept and hung it there, waiting for her to return to consciousness, return to her own mind.

_Jester and Yasha want to be touched, want to be reassured, safe, calm, soothed. And so do you._

* * *

Touching and being touched are two very different things, Beau realises, and now that she knows it, everything gets a little bit harder. She can’t stop reassuring Jester and Yasha now that she has realised—wouldn’t hurt them like that, she’s not actually an asshole, no matter how many times she or anyone else might say it—but every time she does, there is a flicker of…not resentment but something akin to it. It isn’t directed at them but rather at herself. Want, maybe. Guilt, probably. Touching isn’t the same as being touched, and Beau wants someone to want to touch her, to care enough to see what she needs. It feels ungracious of her but…to give back a little of what she gives. Is that too much? It’s too much.

The closer they get to Kamordah, the more Beau remembers that it’s not going to happen again. She made a fool of herself, panicked. That’s why they held her.

Things work in particular ways. Beau knows this. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The seasons follow in their set pattern. Small fish eat smaller fish, big fish eat the small fish. Things have their uses, their purposes. And according to her nature, Beau doesn’t get to need things. That’s not who she is. She isn’t the one who needs a hug or a pat on the shoulder. She won’t get one anyway, so—

A hand wriggles into her own. Or, it tries to, but Beau has it clenched into a painful fist. Instead, Jester wraps her hand around Beau’s wrist instead, fingers curling and stroking there.

‘Okay?’ she asks brightly, worry clear in her eyes.

Beau swallows hard. Her smile ticks at the corner of her mouth but doesn’t stick. ‘Sure. Why not, right?’

‘Maybe because your family seems like shit,’ Yasha suggests in a low, angry rumble. Her hand is big and warm and it rubs up and down Beau’s spine. Makes Beau’s stomach flip and twist, makes her breath crackle out of her on a shuddering breath. She almost steps away from the touch—it’s too _much_ —but she’s greedy.

That’s another thing Beau is, another thing she can add to the list. Smart-ass, shit-kicker, curious, greedy. Four things that she is. She unfurls her hand, the joints of her knuckles creaking with the effort.

Jester takes it. Squeezes.


End file.
